The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (14 page)

It took her quite a while to backtrack the thousand or so meters where she’d roughly estimated the interference came from. The undergrowth could be vigorous in places, and where it was low, the vines and creepers filled the gaps between tree trunks. Her whole route seemed to be one giant detour. There was certainly no sign of any track, animal or human. Nor could she hear any voices.

As she approached the general area, she began to feel sheepish. She’d jumped to a lot of conclusions very quickly. Pirates and conspiracies just seemed to fill her adrenaline-pumped mood. Now she was back to mundane reality. Hot, sweaty, having to swat creeper leaves out of her face the whole time, boots sinking into the damp peaty soil. The one blessing of tramping through this jungle was the lack of insects, at least any of the varieties that feasted on humans; the revitalization team hadn’t introduced any. Though there were plenty of tiny multilegged beetles roving around her feet, a great many of which looked alien to her. A lot of the plant species were certainly nonterrestrial.

After about twenty minutes, Justine simply stopped. She was feeling ridiculous now. There was no sign of any human activity. And if there was a band of hunter pirates creeping down to the landing site through the trees, they were crap at tracking her when she was walking straight at them.

“Can you sense anything?” she asked her e-butler.

“This unit’s sensors are registering some weak electromagnetic activity,” it replied. “It is difficult to locate an origin point. It appears to be operating on a regular cycle.”

“Some kind of radio signal?”

“No. It is a multiband emission, there is no identifiable modulation.”

“A powerburst, then?”

“That is a source which would fit the sensor data.”

“What kind of equipment would generate that?”

“That is unknown.”

“Okay, which direction is it coming from? Give me a graphic.”

The e-butler expanded a simple map into her virtual vision. Justine started walking, pushing the vines apart.

“The emission just repeated,” her e-butler said after she’d gone about fifty meters. “It was much stronger. The sensors are registering a degree of residual activity. There is no pattern to it.”

“Am I still going in the right direction?”

“Yes.”

“What about the pulse duration? Does that correspond to the one which hit the hyperglider?”

“It is very close.”

The trees seemed to be spaced slightly farther apart—although that could have been her imagination. The undergrowth and vines certainly didn’t slacken off. She’d gotten long scratches on her legs.

The overlaid map faded from her sight. “What’s happening?”

There was no reply from her e-butler. She halted and looked at her bracelet. The little power light behind one of the emeralds was winking red.

“Reboot complete,” her e-butler announced abruptly.

“Did the pulse hit you?”

“No data from the event was retained. Another pulse is the most obvious explanation.”

“Can you safeguard against another one?”

Silence answered her.

“Damnit,” she muttered. But she was intrigued now. Something was close by, and it wasn’t pirates.

She almost missed it. The vines had completely swamped the low walls, making the small building look like nothing more than another impenetrable cluster of greenery. But the door had sagged inward, leaving a dark cleft amid the leaves.

Justine pushed up her sunglasses to study the structure for a moment. It certainly wasn’t a house, it was too small for that: just a simple square shelter five meters to a side, with a sloping roof no more than three meters high at the apex. When she pulled the thick cords of creeper from the wall around the door, she found the surface beneath was made of some dull gray composite. Simple panels bolted onto a metal frame, put together in a few hours. It could have been made anywhere in the Commonwealth, even Far Away had the resources to produce this. By the look of the material, and the vegetation clinging to it, the shelter had been here for decades.

There was no lock, so she put her shoulder to the warped door and shoved. It flew open after a few pushes. Light streamed in through the opening; there were no windows. The floor was a single sheet of enzyme-bonded concrete, wet and crumbling. In the middle was a black cylinder just over a meter in diameter and eighty centimeters high. When she went over to it she saw it was actually embedded in the concrete, so she had no idea of its true length. It seemed to be made from a dark metal. Two sets of thin red cable emerged from the top, and ran across the floor to disappear into a translucent disk, half a meter wide. Examining that, she found the disk was also set into the concrete. It glowed with a faint vermilion light that originated deep inside, seemingly well below the concrete floor.

Justine narrowed her eyes at the disk as memories began to stir. She wasn’t even sure why she’d kept such old times in her head when she rejuvenated. But she’d seen something like this before; a lot of buildings on Earth used them as a power backup, places like hospitals and police and transport control centers. A solid-state heat exchange cable sunk kilometers down into the crust, where the geothermal energy could be tapped. They didn’t generate a huge amount of electricity, just enough to keep essential systems functioning in case of emergency.

So what the hell is one doing in the middle of a jungle, halfway up the biggest volcano on Far Away?

She stared at the cables, which were presumably superconductors. The cylinder they were feeding power into must be the source of the em pulses. And the whole arrangement had obviously been here for a long time, at least a couple of decades, and probably a lot longer than that. Certainly nobody had visited for ages, and concrete didn’t crumble overnight. So what could possibly use or absorb that much electricity year after year?

Her puzzlement was pushed aside by surprise as she realized the only thing the cylinder could be: a niling d-sink. They were the ultimate storage devices, and as such were rarely used within the Commonwealth simply because few people needed to store that much power. CST used them as backup supplies for their wormhole gateways, but she couldn’t remember any other organization, commercial or government, having a use for them. They were a quirk of physics, a zero-size sinkhole in spacetime that you could keep filling with energy. Theoretically, any power level could be contained providing the confining quantum field was strong enough. And after uninterrupted decades of charging from the heat exchange cable, this one would have an accumulated power level that wasn’t so much measured in kilowatt hours, more like kilotonnage.

So, a niling d-sink that pushed out an em pulse … 
Unshielded!

Justine got out of the shelter quickly. If it truly was unshielded, the electromagnetic emission would be intense enough to harm her nervous system as the quantum field cycled ready to admit its next input charge.

She hurried away, even more confused now she’d found the source. It began to rain before she got a hundred meters. The storm that had split to curve around the volcano had finally caught up with her.

Kazimir McFoster watched the girl pull a fist-size ball of shiny blue plastic out of the compartment that had opened under the hyperglider’s cockpit. He was sheltering behind a finicus bush, fifty meters away from where the sleek machine had landed. Rain pattered away on his head and the long dark crimson leaves alike. He paid it no heed; this was the weather he had grown up with; always at this time of year the storms would come in the morning. In another hour or so the rain clouds would have blown away to the east leaving the rest of the day mercilessly hot and humid.

The girl casually threw the ball over her shoulder, then tugged a big cylindrical bag from the compartment. He was impressed, for the bag was large and obviously heavy. But despite the clumsy way she carried it, she could lift it easily. She was strong. All offworlders were strong, he knew that. What he hadn’t expected was her beauty.

He had seen the glider pass overhead an hour earlier, a simple cruciform shape, black against the glaring sapphire sky. The sight had enthralled him, it was so graceful, so elegant. All the stories and learning of the Commonwealth and its ways had never prepared him for this. That a machine could be so poised, not just in shape but in function, was a revelation. Machines as Kazimir knew them were blunt and functional.

From his vantage point atop a lava outcrop he’d watched as it swooped ever lower over the jungle. Only once did it wobble in an ungainly fashion, and that was only for an instant. Then its wings had moved like those of a nimble bird as it alighted in the open space. Kazimir had stood looking at the place where it had sunk from sight behind the trees, a simpleton’s smile on his face. It took him a while to realize he was exposed on the rock. Harvey would scold him relentlessly for such a lapse; there would probably be short rations as well to emphasize the point. He was supposed to be well past making such stupid mistakes; that was why he was out here alone in this his final groundwalk, to prove he had mastered the wild. After he returned alive to the clan in another fifteen days, he would be ready to join battle against the alien monster. But not if he stood around like a first-year novice, offering himself as an easy target for any enemy who might be passing.

Kazimir dropped down off the rock and back into the undergrowth. He thought for a moment, placing the glider’s position in his mind. Then he was ready to pathfind through the trees, alert for enemies, focused on his goal.

By the time he’d stealthily crept up to the fringes of the lengthy clearing where the glider had landed, it was raining heavily. He couldn’t see anyone, so he’d found himself a safe place of concealment, and settled down to observe the sleek craft. The girl had appeared a couple of minutes later, her face screwed up against the rain as she hurried out of the trees. She was all in white, a few scraps of cloth clinging to her slender frame. And she was
so
beautiful.
Like an angel,
Kazimir thought.
An angel come down from the sky.

The blue ball that the girl had discarded on the ground began to swell, with folds of thin plastic bulging out in odd shapes. The whole mass rolled around as if it were a living creature in pain. A minute later it had become a bulbous hemispherical shelter four meters across at the base, with a single opening, like a bloated tent. Kazimir nodded in appreciation. His own night-shelter was a little sac of shapeshift membrane that he could inflate with a small electric current. It kept him warm and dry at night, but it wasn’t big enough to move around in. This was a palace in comparison.

The girl hurried inside. Kazimir saw her grimace as she pulled a shabby soaking-wet hat from her head and ran her hands back through equally wet white-blond hair. She delved into her cylindrical bag and produced a towel, which she rubbed vigorously over herself.

Every movement fascinated Kazimir. She had long limbs, all of them perfectly shaped. The way she held her head; proud but never arrogant. Not her. Not the angel.

She eventually finished with the towel, and went over to the fat tent’s opening to peer out. Kazimir held his breath as she looked at the thick bush sheltering him. She smiled coyly, and the universe was a happier place because of it.

For a second.

“It must be uncomfortable crouching behind that bush,” she called. “Why don’t you come out into the open?”

Kazimir’s heart thudded loudly. She must be talking to him, she must have known he was there all along. He fumed, angry that his lack of skill had been mocked so. Yet the angel was still looking at him, head cocked to one side, an expectant expression in place. There actually wasn’t any mockery, he decided.

He rose to his feet, and looked from side to side, half expecting the enemy’s hunters to be there, waiting and grinning. But there was only the rain. So Kazimir had a simple choice, turn and leave, and never see her beauty again, or walk over and let her see him—which, apparently, she could anyway.

He walked toward the blue hemisphere, still wary. The angel’s head was cocked slightly to one side, regarding him with a guarded expression. One of her hands was holding a slim cylinder that he knew had to be some kind of weapon.

“You don’t have any friends nearby, do you?” she asked.

“I walk this forest alone. I need no help to survive here.”

She seemed amused by this. “Of course.” The weapon was pushed discreetly into a pouch on her belt. “Would you like to come in out of the rain? There’s plenty of room in here.”

“You are most kind, I thank you.” When he ducked inside, he was suddenly, unaccountably, overwhelmed by her presence. His eyes sought out the smooth features of the interior, looking everywhere but at her.

“My name’s Justine,” she said gently. There was a hesitancy in her voice, as if she was as uncertain as he.

“Kazimir,” he said. “How did you know I was there?”

A slim arm was raised, a finger tapping just below her right eye. “My inserts have an infrared capability. You were shining quite brightly.” Her lips twitched. “You’re hot you know.”

“Oh.” But he’d foolishly followed the motion of her hand, and now couldn’t look away from her face. Her eyes were light green, he saw, with slim eyebrows. She had long, prominent cheekbones, and a somewhat flattish jaw; a slender button nose poised above wide, moist lips. Every feature was delicate, yet together they awarded her a sophistication he was sure he could never match. And her flawless skin was a shade of pale honey-gold he’d never known before. In surprise, he realized she was very young, close to his own seventeen years. Yet she had flown the glider through the heart of the storm. The courage and talent that must take … He looked at his feet again, aware of distance opening between them.

“Here you go,” she said kindly, and handed him the towel she was holding. “You’re actually wetter than I am.”

Kazimir looked at it in confusion for a moment, before slipping his small backpack off. “Thank you.” He mopped the moisture off his face, then shrugged out of his leather waistcoat. The towel’s thin fabric seemed to suck the droplets off his chest and back as he rubbed, leaving his skin perfectly dry.